David Grann > Quotes

“History is a merciless judge. It lays bare our tragic blunders and foolish missteps and exposes our most intimate secrets, wielding the power of hindsight like an arrogant detective who seems to know the end of the mystery from the outset.”
― David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon: Oil, Money, Murder and the Birth of the FBI

“Empires preserve their power with the stories that they tell, but just as critical are the stories they don’t—the dark silences they impose, the pages they tear out.”
― David Grann, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

“We all impose some coherence—some meaning—on the chaotic events of our existence. We rummage through the raw images of our memories, selecting, burnishing, erasing. We emerge as the heroes of our stories, allowing us to live with what we have done—or haven’t done.”
― David Grann, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

“There was one question that the judge and the prosecutors and the defense never asked the jurors but that was central to the proceedings: Would a jury of twelve white men ever punish another white man for killing an American Indian? One skeptical reporter noted, “The attitude of a pioneer cattleman toward the full-blood Indian…is fairly well recognized.” A prominent member of the Osage tribe put the matter more bluntly: “It is a question in my mind whether this jury is considering a murder case or not. The question for them to decide is whether a white man killing an Osage is murder—or merely cruelty to animals.”
― David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI

“An Indian Affairs agent said, 'The question will suggest itself, which of these people are the savages?”
― David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI

“The authors rarely depicted themselves or their companions as the agents of an imperialist system. They were consumed with their own daily struggles and ambitions—with working the ship, with gaining promotions and securing money for their families, and, ultimately, with survival. But it is precisely such unthinking complicity that allows empires to endure. Indeed, these imperial structures require it: thousands and thousands of ordinary people, innocent or not, serving—and even sacrificing themselves for—a system many of them rarely question.”
― David Grann, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

“As Sherlock Holmes famously said, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
― David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI

“Loneliness is not intolerable when enthusiasm for a quest fills the mind.”
― David Grann, The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon

“Years later, another member [of the Royal Geographical Society] conceded, "Explorers are not, perhaps, the most promising people with whom to build a society. Indeed, some might say that explorers become explorers precisely because they have a streak of unsociability and a need to remove themselves at regular intervals as far as possible from their fellow men.”
― David Grann, The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon

“Persons who have not experienced the hardships we have met with,” Bulkeley wrote, “will wonder how people can be so inhuman to see their fellow creatures starving before their faces, and afford ’em no relief. But hunger is void of all compassion.”
― David Grann, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

“What is gone is treasured because it was what we once were. We gather our past and present into the depths of our being and face tomorrow. We are still Osage. We live and we reach old age for our forefathers.”
― David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI

“There never has been a country on this earth that has fallen except when that point was reached…where the citizens would say, ‘We cannot get justice in our courts.’ ”
― David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI

“Presence of mind, and courage in distress, Are more than armies to procure success.”
― David Grann, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

“In May, when coyotes howl beneath an unnervingly large moon, taller plants, such as spiderworts and black-eyed Susans, begin to creep over the tinier blooms, stealing their light and water. The necks of the smaller flowers break and their petals flutter away, and before long they are buried underground. This is why the Osage Indians refer to May as the time of the flower-killing moon.”
― David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI

“Does God think that, because it is raining, I am not going to destroy the world? - Lope de Aguirre after going mad in the Amazon”
― David Grann, The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon

“Fawcett, quoting a companion, wrote that cannibalism “at least provides a reasonable motive for killing a man, which is more than you can say for civilized warfare.”
― David Grann, The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon

“...much of the discovery of the world was based on failure rather than on success--on tactical errors and pipe dreams.”
― David Grann, The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon

“The world’s richest people per capita were becoming the world’s most murdered.”
― David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI

“Yet an ugliness often lurked beneath the reformist zeal of Progressivism. Many Progressives—who tended to be middle-class white Protestants—held deep prejudices against immigrants and blacks and were so convinced of their own virtuous authority that they disdained democratic procedures.”
― David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI

“A “scuttlebutt” was a water cask around which the seamen gossiped while waiting for their rations. A ship was “three sheets to the wind” when the lines to the sails broke and the vessel pitched drunkenly out of control. To “turn a blind eye” became a popular expression after Vice-Admiral Nelson deliberately placed his telescope against his blind eye to ignore his superior’s signal flag to retreat.”
― David Grann, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

“For years after the American Revolution, the public opposed the creation of police departments, fearing that they would become forces of repression.”
― David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI

“The historian Burns once wrote, “To believe that the Osages survived intact from their ordeal is a delusion of the mind. What has been possible to salvage has been saved and is dearer to our hearts because it survived. What is gone is treasured because it was what we once were. We gather our past and present into the depths of our being and face tomorrow. We are still Osage. We live and we reach old age for our forefathers.”
― David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI

“Death is at all times solemn, but never so much so as at sea,” one sailor recalled. “The man is near you—at your side—you hear his voice, and in an instant he is gone, and nothing but a vacancy shows his loss….There is always an empty berth in the forecastle, and one man wanting when the small night watch is mustered. There is one less to take the wheel, and one less to lay out with you upon the yard. You miss his form, and the sound of his voice, for habit had made them almost necessary to you, and each of your senses feels the loss.”
― David Grann, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

“Indeed these imperial structures require it: thousands and thousands of ordinary people, innocent or not, serving - and even sacrificing themselves for - a system many of them rarely question.”
― David Grann, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

“Many accidents happen to white people because they don't believe their dreams.”
― David Grann, The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon

“Some day this oil will go and there will be no more fat checks every few months from the Great White Father,” a chief of the Osage said in 1928. “There’ll be no fine motorcars and new clothes. Then I know my people will be happier.”
― David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI

“Anthropologists,” Heckenberger said, “made the mistake of coming into the Amazon in the twentieth century and seeing only small tribes and saying, ‘Well, that’s all there is.’ The problem is that, by then, many Indian populations had already been wiped out by what was essentially a holocaust from European contact. That’s why the first Europeans in the Amazon described such massive settlements that, later, no one could ever find.”
― David Grann, The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon

“Stores gone, post office gone, train gone, school gone, oil gone, boys and girls gone—only thing not gone is graveyard and it git bigger.”
― David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI

“Your money draws them and you're absolutely helpless. They have all the law and all the machinery on their side. Tell everybody, when you write your story, that they're scalping our souls out here”
― David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI

“Just as people tailor their stories to serve their interests - revising, erasing, embroidering - so do nations. After all the grim and troubling narratives about the Wager disaster, and after all the death and destruction, the empire had finally found its mythic tale of the sea.”
― David Grann, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder